


Of Cigarettes and Dogs

by Miss_M



Category: Sicario (2015)
Genre: Banter, Canon-Typical Violence, Dogs, Gen, Mission Fic, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-11
Updated: 2016-10-11
Packaged: 2018-08-21 21:45:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8261416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: “I could happily kill you both for a cigarette,” Kate muttered. “You would happily kill us both without the promise of a cigarette.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing.

The inside of the van was hot and stuffy as only a metal can sitting outside in the Arizona sun could get. The A/C had died with a wheeze and a cough around 3 p.m. With the sun finally dipping below the horizon, the air cooling remained more a promise than anything Kate could hold on to and trust it wouldn’t fail her. 

Story of her life, it seemed. 

She’d expected tempers – hers, for one – to fray as fast as the temperature inside the van had risen. She should have known better than to expect the two men flanking her in front of the surveillance console to live down to her expectations so easily. Sudden and dramatic descents to plumb the depths of her ill esteem were more their style.

Matt cracked jokes too smug to be funny or bitched about the heat in a general way. Alejandro said little, as was his wont.

Kate rubbed the red, angry cuticle on the middle finger of her left hand with her index finger. The pressure did nothing for the pain or the gnawing in her gut, so she bit the cuticle off. 

On her left, Matt heaved a sigh. “Fuck’s sake, woman,” he said, sounding genuinely annoyed. “Here, chew on this.” And he tossed a half-empty pack of chewing gum in her lap. It landed precisely in the V formed by Kate’s crotch and thighs.

She would not pick it up even to throw it back at him, wishing it were a stone or a bowling ball. She swept the tiny package onto the floor under the console. Let Matt get down on his knees and look for it if he wanted it back. 

Kate crossed her arms, tucked her hands into her armpits. All that did was add the sweat on her palms to the continent-shaped stains on her shirt. 

“I could happily kill you both for a cigarette,” she muttered. 

On her right, Alejandro spoke up for the first time in over an hour. “That’s not entirely accurate.” 

He sounded as amused as he ever got. Kate cut her eyes at him, but on her left Matt picked up the thread, so she quickly turned her head his way. A woman being taunted by two men: a tale as old as time.

“Yeah,” Matt added. “You would happily kill us both without the promise of a cigarette.”

Kate favored them with a brief glare, one then the other. Matt had banned her from smoking inside the van or even stepping outside to light up, lest the smoke revealed their location. Not an unreasonable request, under the circumstances, yet how Kate itched to add dense tobacco smoke to the smells which filled the overheated van: failing deodorant and the chicken-salad sandwiches they’d eaten for lunch. 

Kate forewent the pleasure of suffocating all three of them and went back to staring at the surveillance screen: a view of an abandoned house sitting on its own in the middle of the Arizona desert, within spitting distance of the border wall. The perfect place for a man looking to escape back into cartel territory to meet up with the _coyote_ who’d sneak him across the border. 

The fact that the house sat on the American side of the border had brought Matt and Alejandro back into Kate’s life, not that Kate had felt much like appreciating the neat, symmetrical inevitability of it. Her signature confirming the legality of everything they’d done during the Juarez op put her at their beck and call for life. Kate waited grimly for Matt to call her his and Alejandro’s bitch to her face some time – she had no doubt he’d done so already where she couldn’t hear – so she’d have an excuse to deck the bastard again. She almost didn’t care if he broke her arm or shot her in retaliation. 

Kate had been coming home from walking her dog when her antennae had perked up at the presence of an unmarked black SUV in her apartment block’s parking lot. A generic car, yet not one she had seen parked there before. A black car with tinted windows idling in front of her building at seven o’clock in the morning.

Goliath has gone rigid, trembling like the terrier which must have contributed heftily to his genepool. Three months after Juarez Kate had found him at the scene of a raid, such a tiny puppy he’d fit in the pocket of her cargo pants. He’d never overcome his distrust of humans. Kate liked being the sole exception, a benevolent force for a single living creature. 

Goliath had launched into a series of sharp barks when Matt had stepped out of the SUV. 

To her shame, Kate had considered dropping Goliath’s leash and running away, just turning her back on Matt and making a break for it. The SUV had been parked between her and her car, of course. She’d had her wallet and her gun with her. She might have made it out of the parking lot alive and free of Matt, that black hole of bullshit which seemed incapable of leaving her out of his schemes. 

Instead she’d stood, as rigid as Goliath, who was still going nuts, tugging on his leash and barking at Matt, while Matt had sauntered toward them, eyeballing Kate’s small, fearless, dumb dog. 

“Got yourself a protector, I see,” Matt had said in lieu of a greeting.

“He reminded me of you,” some part of Kate not paralyzed by his reappearance in her life – often anticipated, never fully countenanced – had managed to reply. “He yaps and yaps, and never says anything useful.”

Matt had grinned, mimed a brief, silent clap. “Been working on that one a while, huh? Come on, park the pooch and grab your shit. We’re meeting Alejandro in Nogales at noon.”

Nogales again. Of course. All the worst days of Kate’s life seemed fated to reoccur. 

“Look lively, campers,” Matt said, his voice echoing slightly inside the van. 

Kate sat up, adrenaline spiking through her at the sight of an old Chevy, held together with rust and dirt, pulling up in front of the dilapidated house. The van sat some distance away, painted the same dun color as the desert. 

Two men stepped out of the car, their faces grainy on the small screen, the holsters under their armpits dark smudges. 

Alejandro’s hand connected with Kate’s shoulder, a jarring of bone and sinew. She half bristled, half cowered – hoped neither reaction showed. The last time he’d touched her, he’d been forcing her hand and pressing a gun under her chin. 

“Move,” Alejandro told her, already moving himself. 

Kate obeyed, let adrenaline and the chain of command carry her along. She was at the bottom of that chain here. There was a comfort to be had, she needed only to perform what she’d been trained to do, she didn’t need to think. 

The door to the deserted house was down, the two men inside, when Kate entered. The twilight meant that her eyes needed a second less to adjust as she passed from outside to inside, from desert heat to the heat of a confined, unventilated space. 

One of the men from the Chevy lay against the far wall, a red vertical line extending upward from his ruined cranium, like a grisly cousin to the pencil mark on a doorway marking a child’s height.

The other man was exchanging gunfire with Alejandro. Matt hung back, in control yet just outside the worst of the fray. Kate wondered, as she raised her weapon and shot the second man in the knee, whether Matt had shot the dead man or he’d let Alejandro handle that as well. 

Caught off guard by the appearance of a third opponent, the survivor went down screaming, his gun spraying fire as he clutched at his ruined knee with his free hand. The bullets barely missed Alejandro before describing a curved line on the wall by Matt’s head. Matt jumped back, shot a dark look at Kate, which she would both relish and worry about when she could spare a moment.

Lowering her weapon, safe yet ready to fire again if needed, Kate advanced into the small house’s only other room, leaving the men to secure their prey. The room had only one window, high on the wall just under the ceiling. On the floor lay a stained mattress and a few scattered toys, their plastic faded and worn by the sand and the heat: a doll with no hair, another doll with only one arm, a Spastic Jack figure.

Behind Kate, the wounded man screamed and railed in Spanish as someone hauled him upright and marched him outside. The cement floor whispered as someone else stopped behind Kate, looking over her shoulder into the room.

She swallowed, her throat a dry riverbed. “There were children here?”

“This house is a waystation,” Alejandro said behind her. Somehow she didn’t wonder at him hanging back rather than Matt. “It’s where they break the children before passing them on to a buyer.” 

If she hadn’t heard what he’d done to Fausto Alarcon’s sons, Kate might have believed that was pure regret, even horror she heard in his voice. A memory, perhaps. But she couldn’t handle seeing more than one side to anything just then.

Kate made herself look away, stormed past Alejandro, and went outside, into the first balmy cool of evening. The evening star was as large as a tangerine above the horizon. 

Matt shut the back door of the van on their jabbering captive, favored Kate with a look while she holstered her gun, fished her cigarettes and lighter out of her pocket with trembling hands. 

“That what they teach you in Quantico – to shoot out kneecaps, leave the bad guys the coordination to return fire?” Matt demanded. “Passive aggression dressed up as plain aggression is a bad look on you, Kate.”

Kate inhaled, the smoke filling her lungs and exacerbating the dryness in her throat. Half a dozen sharp, sarcastic, or just plain foolhardy replies tumbled through her mind in the time it took her to pluck the cigarette from her lips and exhale. 

“If you don’t like my methods, find yourself a different patsy,” she said. 

He smirked at her little show of defiance. “If I thought you’d put any actual thought into it, I’d congratulate you. Shooting the asshole’s knee leaves him plenty alive enough to talk to us about everything he knows. Hell, he won’t even need to see a doctor straight away.”

“Wow, that’s great,” Kate fired back. “You can stick a finger in his wound, maybe waterboard him a little first, huh?”

The shuttered look on Matt’s face, there then gone in the space of breath, made Kate’s heart stutter. Of course they did that too. Why should that have shocked her, knowing who they were, what else they got up to on a regular basis. 

Alejandro passed her by without a word, emerging from her blind spot like a monster in a child’s nightmare, and climbed into the front of the van. Mission done, ready to go… not home, exactly, but somewhere else. Away from that house. 

With that, at least, Kate was in agreement. She finished her cigarette, not wanting to tempt her luck by smoking in the driver’s cabin, even with the windows down. 

At this rate, Kate would run out of patches of desert she didn’t associate with one horror or another.

Once they hit the I-10 heading north, the prisoner’s moans drowned out by the whisper of tires on tarmac – or maybe the man had passed out from the pain – Alejandro told a story about a time in the late 1940s when the US had accidentally bombed Mexico. 

Kate listened in bemusement, again wedged in between the two men, like they didn’t want to risk her jumping out of a moving vehicle to get away from them. Alejandro almost never volunteered anything which wasn’t mission-related. He must have felt especially good about the day’s work, about their catch. The man must have been very important, another _jefe_. 

“They were testing a rocket taken from the Nazis after the war, trying to figure out how to strap an American astronaut to one and send him to the Moon,” Alejandro said. He had a good storytelling voice, quietly emphatic. Kate closed her eyes to blot out the yellow headlights, the men’s dark profiles on either side of her. She did not want to think about Alejandro reading someone bedtime stories in another life. “Something malfunctioned in the rocket’s navigation program, and it went south instead of north. Nearly hit Juarez straight on.” 

Behind the wheel, Matt whistled. “Shit, man. If they’d hit the fucker, they could’ve solved all our problems right there and then. What did the Mexicans do in retaliation, send IED-laden _burros_ across to ambush border patrols?”

“The Mexicans let it go. It was a stable time, a hopeful time. They didn’t want to risk waking the beast. The Americans apologized, and that was that.”

“Pussies,” Matt said. It was unclear which side he meant.

Kate’s cell phone had run out of juice out in the desert. She insisted they drop her off on the outskirts of Phoenix, at a gas station with a payphone which hadn’t been ripped off the wall for the hell of it. She didn’t want them taking her home, like some ghastly parody of a date. She’d call Reggie to give her a ride. Then she’d shower and eat and take Goliath for a long walk. They frequently walked at night when Kate couldn’t sleep, so she braved the monsters lurking in the dark with her gun on her hip and her dog by her side. Often she ended up carrying Goliath back when his short legs proved weaker, Kate’s excess of nervous energy greater than his enthusiasm for exploration. 

Alejandro climbed down from the van to allow Kate out. She turned to take him in where he stood, Matt still inside the van.

“You got anything you need signed?” she demanded, her voice cracking with an anger born of exhaustion, the day’s work and the long grind of being at these men’s disposal. “I don’t want you turning up at my place whenever the mood strikes.”

She glared at Alejandro. He looked back at her, his face expressionless. Kate wanted to hit him. She settled for turning her glare on Matt, who looked amused. 

“Nah,” Matt said. “We got all we need. You can run along now.” 

Kate took a step back, preparing to turn around and walk away, yet also wanting to keep an eye on them. The nervous tug between hunter and prey, only she couldn’t even tell which one she was anymore from one moment to the next. 

“Who was that man?” she asked. “The other one, the one you killed.” She felt idiotic even before she’d uttered the first syllable. 

Matt spat out of his window. “Broken fucking record,” he told the gas pumps, the empty convenience store, like the sight of Kate standing there with her futile challenge was too tiresome to deal with. “Go back to your life, Macer. We’ll be in touch.” 

“Take care of yourself, Kate,” Alejandro offered as he climbed into the van. 

A low moan rattled from the windowless back of the van, like something from a zombie movie. Their prey was coming to, the stillness jarring him into pained wakefulness. 

Kate pointed her index finger like a gun at Alejandro. “The next time I see you, I’m siccing my dog on you.”

She strode to the payphone, Matt’s laughter and the crunch of tires receding away behind her. Let them laugh at her silly threat, her tiny dog, the ease with which they could make her sit up and fetch, troublesome though she could be. She’d needed to say something, to give herself some proof of the life still inside her. 

As she lit a sweet, solitary cigarette and dialed, and waited for Reggie to wake up and answer his phone, Kate wondered how Goliath would enjoy walking until dawn. Like the man in the van, Kate couldn’t abide to be still and quiet just then. She’d pack sandwiches and water in a knapsack, maybe she could put Goliath in it when he got too tired to walk. He was small, but he could weigh heavy when she had to carry him for long – but then, she wouldn’t walk so far from home if she knew a better way of surviving till dawn. If she hadn’t made the choices she’d made. In the morning nothing would be changed for the better, but every hour she conquered till then would have to count for something, Kate hoped, too tired to summon up the fervor which might have turned her hope into something tangible. Something she could hold on to.


End file.
